I
Whitman protests against his "Leaves" being judged merely as literature;
but at the same time, if they are not good literature, that of course ends
the matter. Still while the questions of art, of form, of taste, are
paramount in most other poets,--certainly in all third and fourth rate
poets, in Whitman they are swallowed up in other questions and values.
In numerous passages, by various figures and allegories, Whitman indicates
that he would not have his book classed with the order of mere literary
productions.
"Shut not your doors to me, proud libraries," he says in one of the
"Inscriptions,"--
"For that which was lacking in all your well-fill'd shelves, yet needed
most, I bring.
Forth from the war emerging, a book I have made,
The words of my book nothing, the drift of it everything,
A book separate, not link'd with the rest nor felt by the intellect,
But you, ye untold latencies will thrill to every page."
Not linked with the studied and scholarly productions, not open to the
mere bookish mind, but more akin to the primitive utterances and oracles
of historic humanity. A literary age like ours lays great stress upon the
savor of books, art, culture, and has little taste for the savor of real
things, the real man, which we get in Whitman.
"It is the true breath of humanity," says Renan, "and not literary merit,
that constitutes the beautiful." An Homeric poem written to-day, he goes
on to say, would not be beautiful, because it would not be true; it would
not contain this breath of a living humanity. "It is not Homer who is
beautiful, it is the Homeric life." The literary spirit begat Tennyson,
begat Browning, begat the New England poets, but it did not in the same
sense beget Whitman, any more than it begat Homer or Job or Isaiah. The
artist may delight in him and find his own ideals there; the critic may
study him and find the poet master of all his weapons; the disciple of
culture will find, as Professor Triggs has well said, that "there is no
body of writings in literature which demands a wider conversancy with the
best that has been thought or said in the world,"--yet the poet escapes
from all hands that would finally hold him and monopolize him. Whitman is
an immense solvent,--forms, theories, rules, criticisms, disappear in his
fluid, teeming pages. Much can be deduced from him, because much went to
the making up of his point of view. He makes no criticism, yet a
far-reaching criticism is implied in the very start of his poems. No
modern poet presupposes so much, or requires so much preliminary study and
reflection. He brings a multitude of questions and problems, and, what is
singular, he brings them in himself; they are implied in his temper, and
in his attitude toward life and reality.
Whitman says he has read his "Leaves" to himself in the open air, that he
has tried himself by the elemental laws; and tells us in many ways, direct
and indirect, that the standards he would be tried by are not those of art
or books, but of absolute nature. He has been laughed at for calling
himself a "Kosmos," but evidently he uses the term to indicate this
elemental, dynamic character of his work,--its escape from indoor,
artificial standards, its aspiration after the "amplitude of the earth,
and the coarseness and sexuality of the earth, and the great charity of
the earth, and the equilibrium also."